Computational assessment of memory function in kidney transplant recipients and donors

Impaired memory function is a frequent yet understudied symptom in kidney transplant recipients. In part, this knowledge gap reflects the lack of scalable, sensitive, and low-burden tools for quantifying memory function in large clinical populations. The aim of this study is to evaluate a brief, remote memory assessment and to examine memory function and its clinical correlates in kidney transplant recipients compared with healthy controls.

In this cross-sectional study, we demonstrate a remote, minimally burdensome memory screener, the Seattle-Groningen Memory Assessment, which estimates a patient's speed of forgetting from paired-associate learning. Participants aged 22-86 years from a large transplant cohort completed an eight-minute online memory test. Memory performance was compared between kidney transplant recipients (n = 556) and kidney donors (n = 408). Associations with demographic, clinical, and physiological variables were examined using regression analyses.

Here, we show that the memory score derived from an eight-minute session is a reliable and accurate measure of an individual's ability for long-term retention. Kidney transplant recipients show more forgetting than donors. Memory scores are sensitive to demographic factors, including age and education level, and are associated with self-reported sleep quality, fatigue, and health-related quality of life. On the physiological level, more forgetting in recipients is linked to higher monocyte, neutrophil, reticulocyte, and white blood cell counts, as well as lower ferritin and greater iron deficiency.

This work highlights the potential of computational memory assessment as a minimally burdensome and reliable tool for detecting cognitive impairment in complex clinical populations. Such tools may enable scalable monitoring of cognitive health and improve the detection of subtle cognitive changes relevant for disease progression and treatment evaluation.